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Wicca, a neo-pagan religion

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Christian web sites that describe Wicca

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NOTE

This section was written in 1998 when a great deal of anti-Wiccan hate
literature appeared on the Internet. Since then, conservative Protestant
Christian groups have generally abandoned their misinformation.

They still condemn Wicca but are far more accurate in their depiction of
Wicca.
We have left this essay online for historical purposes. The essays they
describe caused
a
lot of
pain
at the time, and not a few physical attacks on
Wiccans, so they should not be forgotten.

Quotation:

"Christian parents have a three-fold duty where witchcraft is
concerned: understand the nature of the threat, protect their families
from its influence, and most important, reach out to Wiccan teens to
prevent the loss of a whole generation." Excerpt from OnMission
magazine 1

Overview:

Back in the early days of the Internet, almost all of the articles and essays
that were written about Wicca by Cowans (non-Wiccans) contained gross inaccuracies. To our
knowledge, all were written by conservative Protestant ministries,
counter-cult groups,
or individual conservative Protestants. A few web
sites disseminated misinformation which appear to have been intended to generate hatred against Wiccans.
Much of their material seemed to have come from Christian propaganda in the
Renaissance when the church was burning and hanging religious minorities. Few, if any, of the authors appeared to have consulted any primary sources
during the preparation of their essays. It seems obvious from the content of their
articles that few if any of the authors had actually talked with a Wiccan. In 1996, when the
first edition of this essay was written, we were only able to find two positive
portrayals of Wicca by Cowans; both of them severely criticized their fellow
Christian authors for spreading inaccuracies about Wicca.

In recent years, there has been a flood of relatively accurate descriptions
of Wiccan and other Neopagan religions on the Internet's Christian web sites. We suspect that this has been caused by
the increased availability of Wiccan and other Neopagan information to Cowans.
This happened for a number of reasons, including:

Wiccan and other Neopagan groups have created many
thousands of web sites, thus making accurate information generally available
from a wide variety of primary sources.

The unusually high growth rate of Neopaganism from the 1990s until now,
particularly among youth.

The increasing percentage of Wiccans who are coming out of the
[broom] closet and going public with their faith traditions.

Increasing numbers of open Pagan rituals to which the public and media are
invited.

However, this increasing accuracy does not seem to extend beyond written
material to the content of videos. A former Neopagan who has converted to
conservative Protestantism commented that they have never seen a conservative
Christian video about Wicca, other Neopagan religions or occult activities that
gives an accurate portrayal of these activities. In their opinion, all are
filled with sensationalism and inaccuracy. All would hurt conservative
Christians' efforts to evangelize Neopagans by supplying the former with
erroneous information about the latter. Rather than help their evangelical
activities it would hurt them.